Take oil pastels and wellies to feel at home on the farm
It allowed me indulge my fondness for metal, steel, shiny surfaces juxtaposed with cattle
MARY BURKE
Milking at Knockainey
When fouryear-old Mary Burke saw her uncle’s “large, hand-painted billboard ad for Hennessy brandy of a man in a red riding jacket”, she told her mother she wanted to be an artist. “There were keen amateur artists on both sides of my family,” she says, and life-size classical sculptures at the RDS and paintings at the National Gallery in Dublin had her thinking “I would like to do that”.
Primary school teachers at Our Lady’s Grove in Goatstown encouraged her. “Aged eight or nine, I had the double pleasure of skipping lessons and spending days in the secondary school art room with Mother Germaine,” she recalls.
In secondary school, she drew caricatures of her teachers “much to the amusement of my classmates, while provoking some mixed reactions in the staff room”.
At the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), where she was taught by Jackie Stanley, Carey Clarke, Eithne Jordan, Ciaran Lennon and Felim Egan, Burke began painting suburban Dublin, her first real painting being an oil pastel of the box room window in her family home on Larchfield Road, Goatstown.
She’s painted shadows cast by venetian blinds; the glass, shiny, steel surfaces and reflections at Dublin airport; houses, cars and wing mirrors reflecting a road, sometimes including people discreetly, and always in oil pastels — required materials in first year at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD).
Burke tried them out for her
self and “it was love at first sight.” These “refined crayons” allow her to draw and paint at the same time. Beyond Goatstown, Burke has featured local authority homes in Tallaght and Stradbally, Co Laois, projects that “involved me meeting and interacting with residents, which I hadn’t done before”.
In Stradbally, she painted “a late 20th-century semi-detached house, a new build, a 19th-century terraced home, homes of the parish priest and undertaker” and the elegant interiors of Stradbally Hall, built in 1772.
Though she knows that Tallaght and Stradbally “face challenges of deprivation, unemployment or neglect”, Burke focuses on the positive.
Her interiors contain evidence of human activity (though not people): “choice of decor, collectibles, family pets tell a lot” and “there is also a human presence provided by those viewing the painting”.
Windows and doorways create an inside, outside world and compositionally “they hint at location, let the light in and the architectural framework acts as scaffolding on which to build a composition. Success is if, on completion, I look at a painting and feel that I am back there”.
Burke has also painted farther afield, in the US and Canada. A Vermont residency meant amazing light, cerulean skies, bright white snow.
“I sat out in the snow making oil pastel studies of clapboard houses every day,” she says.
At Home on the Farm, Burke’s new work — at Limerick City Gallery of Art, until May 2 for virtual tours — might seem a new direction, but she sees it as a natural progression.
“In Ireland, farming is in our collective DNA” and Burke’s own ancestors farmed in Tipperary, Cork and Waterford.
She bought a pair of wellies, visited five farms in Kilmallock, Kilfinane, Shanagolden, Lough Gur, Knockainey and painted farmhouse, outhouses, a ruined castle, fields under moody skies, a herd of cattle and Milking at
Knockainey.
It’s of a milking parlour on John Macnamara’s farm in East Limerick where Macnamara, named champion grass grower of the year in 2018, milks a herd of 241 Friesians.
This painting celebrates hard work, modern farming and “took two solid months”.
“I enjoyed every minute and it allowed me indulge my fondness for metal, steel, shiny surfaces juxtaposed with cattle.”
Look carefully. Smell it. Hear it. The pitched, skylighted, corrugated roof, the intricate machinery, those cows all in a row, their milk flowing into luminous glass containers. Now find the figure. Where’s my wellies?